Department of Transportation extends GM supervision for another year

Department of Transportation extends GM supervision for another yearChris Bruce

In the wake of the General Motors' ignition switch recall last year, the automaker was hit by a $35 million fine from the US Department of Transportation last May and agreed to what was called at the time, "unprecedented oversight" by the agency. A year after that decision, the US DOT has decided to extend its watch over the company's safety reporting for an additional year.

"GM learned a hard lesson last year. We expect to see the improvements they've made continue and that their new approaches are applied to every GM safety issue and every recall. Today's action will help keep them on the right track," US Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said in the announcement.

The Feds decided to extend its close regulatory supervision an additional year because "the consent order has proven to be a productive and effective tool." The oversight duties actually fall on National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and it has the ability to review GM's process for deciding on defect issues. The automaker also is required to submit reports and hold regular meetings with the regulator.

"We have used our monthly meetings with NHTSA to foster a relationship that's candid, transparent and totally focused on the safety of our customers. We've come a long way and we fully intend to build on this progress," said GM spokesperson Alan Adler in a statement to Autoblog.

In 2014, GM recalled nearly 27 million vehicles in the US. So far, the company's ignition switch resolution facility has accepted claims for over 100 fatalities that were linked to that faulty part.
Show full PR textU.S DOT Extends Federal Oversight of General Motors

The news comes on the anniversary of GM's historic agreement with NHTSA after facing record fines for the long-delayed Chevrolet Cobalt recall

WASHINGTON – The U.S. Department of Transportation's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) today announced that it has decided to extend federal oversight of General Motors' review, decision-making and communications about potential vehicle safety issues for an additional year. In a May 14 letter, NHTSA requires GM to continue submitting reports to and meeting with NHTSA so that the agency may monitor the progress of GM's investigation of potential safety issues and other actions required by NHTSA's May 2014 Consent Order.

"GM learned a hard lesson last year. We expect to see the improvements they've made continue and that their new approaches are applied to every GM safety issue and every recall. Today's action will help keep them on the right track," said U.S. Transportation Secretary Foxx.

Last May, the company agreed in the Consent Order to pay a record $35 million civil penalty and to take part in unprecedented oversight requirements as a result of findings from NHTSA's timeliness investigation regarding the Chevrolet Cobalt and the automaker's failure to report a safety defect in the vehicle to the federal government in a timely manner. The defect resulted in the non-deployment of airbags in certain Chevrolet Cobalt and other GM models. Today's action is an extension of certain requirements of that agreement. Other requirements continue for an additional two years.

NHTSA extended its oversight because the consent order has proven to be a productive and effective tool to proactively and expeditiously address potential safety-related defects.
"Our oversight has been effective and GM's in a better place. We expect that our agreement will help them continue to improve their safety culture," said NHTSA Administrator, Mark Rosekind. "Automakers can learn an important lesson from GM. Follow the rules, be accountable for your products, take good care of your customers and always make safety the priority."


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Another race-car-building ritual: taking the engine-donor shell to The Crusher

Pull the 1.8T engine for the race car, sell the rest at $130/ton

Most of the time, the cheapest way to get a complete engine/transmission setup with all the harnesses, computers, and other bits that make an engine swap work is to buy a wrecked or ugly donor vehicle, pull the stuff you want, sell off as many parts as you can, and then bring the remains to your local scrapper.

So far, the build of my 1941 Plymouth Special Deluxe hillclimb car has consumed two donor vehicles: a worn-out 1992 Lexus SC400 and a rollover-victim 2009 Chevrolet Trailblazer. Both of those were fed into The Crusher's cold steel jaws (I always capitalize the name of The Crusher, out of respect), and yesterday we returned with another offering to the global commodity markets: a B5 VW Passat.

The Rocket Surgery Racing VW-powered Renault 4CV at High Plains Raceway Photo by Murilee Martin

In addition to building the chassis for my Plymouth, Colorado engineer and hot rodder Rich von Sneidern has a few other race-car projects in or around his shop. There's his evil-looking 1978 Checker Marathon, of course, and there's also the Rocket Surgery Racing Renault 4CV, which features a mid-mounted Volkswagen Golf engine and Audi front-wheel-drive transaxle driving the rear wheels. The 4CV weighs very little and goes pretty well with its naturally aspirated engine, but Rich is looking to retire the Renault from LeMons racing and add enough forced-induction power to make the car a proper Colorado hillclimber.

Plenty of room for more engine in the back of the 4CV! Photo by Murilee Martin

One great thing about looking at VWs and Audis as potential engine donors is that they depreciate hard after about age 10, and once the interior gets icky or the body gets banged up you can just about name your price. Rich is a regular at local police-impound auctions, so he kept his eyes open for an Audi A4 or (platform-mate) VW Passat with 1.8T turbo engine. Sure enough, he picked up a smashed-up-but-running Passat for $600.

Our usual Crusher had just closed its doors forever, two days earlier. Where now? Photo by Murilee Martin

A few years ago, when Chinese industry was booming and scrap cars were fetching $250/ton in Denver, The Crusher's waiting room was a madhouse of cool cars about to be shredded without mercy. These days, though, scrap cars are down to $130/ton around here, and so things have calmed down at the metal-recycling places. We brought the Passat over to our usual place, the one with employees who aren't too picky about paperwork… and it had just closed its doors forever, a mere two days earlier. Others with unwanted cars on trailers or flatbeds showed up while we were there, and everyone had to scramble to find another low-hassle Crusher nearby.

A little research revealed another Crusher a couple of miles away. Photo by Murilee Martin

Like all big cities, Denver has numerous businesses that buy scrap metal, so we did a little smartphone research and hit the road.

Here we go! Photo by Murilee Martin

This place wasn't too busy, so we drove right up to the big scale.

All these cars have hours or maybe just minutes to live. Shame about the early Volvo 244. Photo by Murilee Martin

While Rich went to go haggle with the cashier, I checked out the other cars being dropped off as scrap. Mostly they were the usual 20-year-old Saturns and beat-up Chrysler Cloud Cars, no loss there, but this doomed early Volvo 240 made me a little sad. 240s are getting scrapped in huge numbers these days, in spite of having excellent racing potential, and this one was too battered to be worth saving.

You don't see many of these on the street. Photo by Murilee Martin

Here's a solid-looking early-'90s Toyota Corolla station wagon, complete with roof rack. A rare though not valuable car, and it's worth more as scrap than as a vehicle.

Filling out paperwork at The Crusher. Photo by Murilee Martin

Assuming that he'd be going to the laissez-faire Crusher down the road, Rich hadn't bothered to bring the bill of sale from the police auction. That caused a time-consuming hassle but everything got sorted out after a while. The employees at this yard made him fill out some paperwork, so that if the car's VIN set off alarm bells with The Man they'd be able to track him down.

Say goodbye to the engine donor. Photo by Murilee Martin

The car was stuffed full of additional scrap from other projects, which compensated a bit for the lack of drivetrain and wiring harnesses. Once the truck and empty trailer went back on the scale, we learned that the Passat and its contents were worth 160 bucks. Once Rich sells off some of the parts he yanked off the car (e.g., the stereo and some interior bits), his engine/transmission should be nearly free.

Such luxury! Photo by Murilee Martin

On the way out, we passed this Lincoln Town Car coming in. It looks clean, but it was unwanted.

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John Phillips: I Just Keep Collecting Toyotas—and Another One May Be on the Way

From the June 2015 issue

Lots of people live in the mountains. I live on a mountain. Not the top, exactly. But I can see the top from my porch. The driveway leading to Dead Loss Ranch is a two-mile festival of filth—sucking mud, ice suitable for skating, ruts that sometimes flip ATVs, razors of granitic outcroppings, and a pair of mountain lions (Sid and Nancy) that recently tried to eat Red Schields’s dogs at 1 a.m. The road is navigable at walking speed only.

Last month, my wife realized she needed the sort of vehicle that could handle, say, Mosul after the big drone strikes. She liked a black Volkswagen Tiguan (too little ground clearance), a Honda HR-V (ditto, also not available), then drove everything badged by Subaru. While testing a silver Forester, she asked, “Is our driveway gonna break this little thing?”

“Not in the first week,” I said.

So we purchased an army-green 2011 Toyota FJ Cruiser, with 45,000 miles and no signs of off-roading, with a year’s warranty, for $24,000. When negotiations concluded, it was too late to drive home, so we stayed in Missoula’s Hampton Inn. At around midnight, I dashed down to the parking lot to celebrate the green wonderfulness of my purchase, but the FJ resembled a Minnesota ice-fishing shack under all the snow. I’ve written about cars for 40 years, so you’d think the fluttery giddiness of new-car ownership would wane. Nope. I could barely sleep. The FJ seemed the portal to all the world’s happiness.

All Montanans carry a “bug-out bag.” It’s in case the FJ gets crushed by a Ponderosa pine on Magruder pass and I have to walk to another Hampton Inn. So, my survival pack now contains a handsaw, foil bivvy bags, MREs (weighing as much as Packard bumpers), solid-fuel tablets (a largish explosion might alert my rescuers), an army canteen the color of the FJ, a buck knife that would scare O.J., and 42 other items. Really, I counted them all. The bag is so dense that beams of light curve around it. Just for assurance, I tossed in some Percocets. I’m pretty sure I’ll take only the Percocets.

So, that particular pack now reposes alongside my vehicle-retrieval pack, itself resembling a body bag filled with snatch straps, D-rings, a hand winch, chains, party hats, and so forth. All that tonnage may diminish the FJ’s mileage—perhaps the reason that I get stranded in the first place.

I installed 265/65R-18 Goodyear Wrangler DuraTracs on black Method Fat Five wheels—the FJ now matches my Toyota Tundra—as well as a trailer hitch and a bull bar. Those last items required maybe four hours of me supine on cement colder than a coroner’s office. At one point, I had to lower the FJ’s exhaust, which rocketed off to gouge a Noriega-quality divot in my chin. And one instruction for the bull-bar bracket stipulated 2010 and older FJs, which mine is not. But by then I’d already torched and tortured the attachments into interesting sculptures that fit. Duct tape may have been involved. I love the English language, but I rarely understand instruction manuals. I remember a manual for a Denon turntable that warned, “Do not subject the tonearm to twistery.” That was the only instruction that ever made sense to me. By the way, snigger at my bull bar if you want, but I’m knee-deep in bulls here. Not just elk and moose and bighorn rams, but escaped bull bulls, all snorting and pawing and power-defecating 30 feet from my kitchen. Sometimes they’ll eat stale éclairs.

Bags of power? No. Bags of MREs, chains, straps, and explosives.

My wife decreed the FJ homely, so she named it Frida, after artist Frida Kahlo, famous for her tarantula unibrow and for having married muralist Diego Rivera. Which means she has begun referring to my Tundra as Diego. It’s mildly confusing, inasmuch as her previous name for it was the Big Blue Bastard. You might like to know that the FJ’s registration says: “Vehicle Type: Rugged Terrain.” Where else but Montana will the state officially validate your manhood?

As soon as Frida was winter-worthy, my wife looped Diego 180 degrees on ice covering our driveway’s “Climbing Ess.” I drove to her rescue, immediately fashioning a fantastically dangerous web of cables and straps and D-rings that could easily have killed all The Flying Wallendas. But it worked. So, kudos to the FJ’s prowess, Week One.

When I moved to Montana, I envisioned many satisfying hours spent in my mountain-aerie garage, rebuilding an early ’70s twin-cam Lotus Europa, an automobile so ­fragile that merely shipping it from the factory invited catastrophe. A good jostling by side winds can total a Europa. But for any Lotus to inhabit my garage, it will have to be air-dropped via twin-rotor Sikorsky. And, so, I’ve instead located a resto-worthy ’77 FJ40 Land Cruiser in a Darby junkyard, and I am going to bid on it as soon as I calculate how much rust costs per pound. I may soon be flat-towing an FJ behind an FJ. Symmetry lowers your blood pressure. So do stale éclairs.

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